Candide

When first seen at the Paris Châtelet in 2006, Robert Carsen's staging of Candide made international news. La Scala announced it was not going to share the production as planned because, it was suggested, it feared political fallout from a scene in which international leaders, including Silvio Berlusconi, were savagely caricatured.

The Milan house did relent, though it never occurred to anyone that perhaps it had rejected the show simply because it wasn't very good. In its latest reincarnation for English National Opera, Carsen's Candide turns out to be a huge disappointment: flabby and second-rate.

Although the musical numbers remain more or less intact, Carsen and his co-conspirator, Ian Burton, have rewritten the book. Everything starts promisingly, with newsreel footage of the US in the 1950s and 60s screened during the overture, and a first scene framed in Michael Levine's design by the outline of a 1960s TV set and transplanted to the Kennedy White House. With Voltaire's Westphalia translated into "West Failure" it seems as if Candide's journey from innocence to experience will be that of the US through the past half-century, from the wide-eyed optimism of the Kennedy era to the cynical corruption of the current Bush regime. But the production loses that sharp focus all too rapidly, and descends into a scattergun series of increasingly coarse-grained swipes against the US way of life. Leonard Bernstein's original certainly has its problems of narrative continuity and dramatic coherence, but Carsen's reworking makes them worse. When witnessing all this heavy-handed satire, it's impossible to forget the director is Canadian, as so much of what he puts on stage seems like retaliation for the excesses and vulgarities of a noisy neighbour.

But the main victim of this parade of specious imagery is Bernstein's imperishably witty, bittersweet score. The music is squeezed between the vast expanses of dialogue, though it still occasionally lifts the spirits - especially the patter songs delivered expertly by Alex Jennings, doubling as Voltaire and the fatally optimistic Dr Pangloss.

Jennings' performance is by a long way the best in the show. Rumon Gamba's conducting has little wit or punch, and neither Toby Spence's bland Candide nor Anna Christy's pinched-sounding Cunegonde gains from the amplification, while Beverley Klein's overacted Old Lady epitomises everything that is wrong with this flatulent production.

· Until July 12. Box office: 0871 911 0200.